Stand Out: VR Battle Royale is one of the most ambitious VR games on the market right now. It’s in Steam Early Access and it pits about 30 players against one another on a single, large map in a fight to the death. It’s battle royale game of course, like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) but it’s entirely in VR. You have to physically reload your guns, you can climb around on the environment, and even duck to take cover. Raptor Lab is a small indie studio so it’s extremely unpolished and rough around the edges, but it’s got a dedicated community and is tons of fun if you can look past the shortcomings. Well, now they’re pushing things even further with War Dust.
War Dust features twice as many players as Stand Out, with 64, and will include tons of vehicles, large objective-based maps, and more to try and make your Battlefield VR dreams a reality. It’s just now in Alpha (not even Early Access or Beta yet) so it’s even rougher than Stand Out, but it sure does sound impressive.
You can see in the trailer above that War Dust is much more than just another VR FPS. You can fly jets and helicopters, drive tanks and ATVs, and so much more. In a press release the company sent me, they say that their vision for War Dust is to “create a feeling of being a part of a real epic war” rather than just small-scale skirmishes like other VR titles.
Obviously, the concern is player count. Firewall Zero Hour is a PSVR-exclusive 4v4 multiplayer-only shooter on PSVR and even that game sometimes has down times and Sony was concerned about player counts — and there are three million PSVR headsets out there. I highly doubt there are that many Rifts, Vives, and Windows VR headsets combined but that isn’t stopping Raptor Lab.
In War Dust you and 31 other players join together for a massive 32v32 battle with all 64 of you on the same map at the same time fighting it out. Then having to worry about aerial enemies, dogfights, tanks, and more honestly seems too ambitious to be real.
It’s worth mentioning that Raptor Lab doesn’t have the greatest track record with actually finishing games. Their Steam catalog is already four games deep and now War Dust is on the horizon. Both Stand Out, their battle royale offering, and Deus Vult, a fantasy-themed melee action game, are still in Early Access and have been for a while.
Now with lots of VR FPS games on the horizon, like Zero Caliber, Warzone, Population One, Virtual Battlegrounds, and plenty of existing titles as competition, War Dust won’t have an easy time getting 64-players online at all times.
You can find more information about War Dust on the official Steam page and if you’re interested in joining the Alpha test period, which starts today on October 12th, 2018, then you can do so at the company’s official Discord server here.
Let us know what you think of War Dust in the comments below!
